New TLDs

US Senate Committee Holds Hearing on ICANN’s New TLD Expansion

As previously noted, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation today held a full committee hearing on ICANN's expansion of top level domains (TLDs). The hearing was held to examine the merits and implications of the program and ICANN's efforts to address concerns raised. ICANN will begin accepting applications for new TLDs on January 12, 2012. more

Google: Not All ccTLD’s Are Created Equally in Generic Search Rankings

There is a very interesting video posted on YouTube.com from Matt Cutts of Google who answered the question about how ccTLD's are viewed by Google especially when they are being used as domain hacks. Here is the question: "We have a vanity domain (http://ran.ge) that unfortunately isn't one of the generic TLDs, which means we can't set our geographic target in Webmaster Tools. Is there any way to still target our proper location?" more

Making IDN gTLDs Attractive and Safe

The primary focus of this article is to illustrate that the Applicant Guidebook is not supplying sufficient protection mechanisms, and creates too high financial barrier for those who are interested in applying for multiple Top-Level Domains (TLDs) that are translations/transliterations of each other and/or of an existing generic Top-Level Domains (tt-gTLDs). more

Gruber Gives Up On His IDN

Tech pundit John Gruber threw in the towel on his domain ?df.ws. He writes: "What I didn't foresee was the tremendous amount of software out there that does not properly parse non-ASCII characters in URLs, particularly IDN domain names." more

How the Registrar Cash Flow Model Could Collapse with New ICANN gTLDs

New top-level domain applicants are getting plenty of advice nowadays about how to launch their new Registry. In addition to thinking about their branding and distribution, they should also be thinking about their business practices with Registrars. What many of them do not realize is that their cash flow practices, with respect to Registrars, may be a factor of whether ICANN Registrars even support their Registry. more

A New Blog About “New gTLDs”

There are many blogs about new gTLDs. Some are interesting, others are not. Some are about domaining in which new gTLDs are included, some are from Law Firms and rather repetitive about the necessity to protect a brand in the Trademark Clearinghouse and how URS is the best (billable) mechanism to protect the brand; some are truly about domain names and remain must-read; very few are about new gTLDs only. more

Interview: Antony Van Couvering on the New TLD Opportunity

I recently caught up with a former colleague Antony Van Couvering. Many here on CircleID probably know him, he's been active in the domain name business since the late 1990's. With the new Top-Level Domain (TLD) issue so white hot and with Antony's firm right in the mix, I thought it was time to get his take via an interview. If anyone has questions (or challenges perhaps?) to anything below, I'm happy to forward to Antony for a response. more

New gTLDs: Is Internationalism the Solution?

Are international strings such as "club" and "rugby" the key to launch a successful TLD in Round 2 of the ICANN new gTLD program? Are "International TLDs" the key to a successful Registry? That is quite possible as the results of the recent .CLUB launching show that it generated lots of interest in a short period of time. The .CLUB registry is now number 3 on the list of most registered domain names with 37,806 domains registered and .EMAIL is in position 6. more

CENTR Statement on IDN Homograph Attacks

Recently a proof of concept attack was announced on the Internet that demonstrated how a web address could be constructed that looked in some web browsers identical to that of a well known website. This technique could be used to trick a user into going to a website that they did not plan on visiting, and possibly provide sensitive information to a third party. As a result of this demonstration, there has been a number of voices calling for web browsers to disable or remove support for IDNs by default. ...CENTR, a group of many of the world's domain registries - representing over 98% of domain registrations worldwide - believes such strong reactions are heavily detrimental... more

Over 75% of All Top-Level Domains (TLDs) Now Signed With DNSSEC

As I was entering in data for the weekly DNSSEC Deployment Maps, I was struck by the fact that we are now at the point where 617 of the 795 top-level domains (TLDs) are now signed with DNSSEC. You can see this easily at Rick Lamb's DNSSEC statistics site...Now, granted, most of that amazing growth in the chart is because all of the "new generic TLDs" (newgTLDs) are required to be signed with DNSSEC, but we are still seeing solid growth around the world. more

Who Really Cares About New gTLDs?

ICANN's recent announcement of what it called "an exciting milestone in the evolution of the domain name system" - the delegation of the 1,000th new generic top-level domain (gTLD) - went largely unnoticed. While that's consistent with the new gTLD program in general (at least from the perspective of the general public), that doesn't mean trademark owners should forget about them. more

Can ICANN Meet The Needs Of “Less Developed” Countries?

On World Telecommunications Day last Saturday, the question of the digital divide?the difference between the so-called "developed" and "less developed" countries in terms of the availability and use of new information and communications technologies, particularly regarding access and use of the Internet?was one of the main topics of debate. However, less is understood about the growing knowledge and participation divide between "developed" and "undeveloped" countries on decisions regarding the global structure of the Internet that is currently under the mandate of the Internet Corporation for the Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)... more

You Just Signed a Registry Contract With ICANN. What Are Your Plans?

Back on February 4, 2013, I wrote a CircleID post entitled 'How the registrar Cash Flow Model Could Collapse with New ICANN gTLDs.' My key point back then was this: new gTLD applicants need to be mindful of how the cash flow policies of their registry (and of their back-end service provider) could impact whether their TLD is actively promoted by ICANN registrars... registries have historically assumed near-zero risk. This is going to change. more

The Internet Running Out of Everything?

We know that the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses and that some in our community check twice a day Mat Ford's doomsday clock or spend an hour once a week reading the tea leaves based on Geoff Huston's exhaustive data compiled at Potaroo. Like with global warming, there is still a school of thought out there arguing that this running out of IP addresses is just fear mongering and that we are not really running out of IPv4 addresses as a NATted world is more than adequate to run the Internet for the foreseeable future. We know that the Internet is running out of AS... more

Ongoing Internet Emergency and Domain Names

There is a current ongoing Internet emergency: a critical 0day vulnerability currently exploited in the wild threatens numerous desktop systems which are being compromised and turned into bots, and the domain names hosting it are a significant part of the reason why this attack has not yet been mitigated. This incident is currently being handled by several operational groups. This past February, I sent an email to the Reg-Ops (Registrar Operations) mailing list. The email, which is quoted below, states how DNS abuse (not the DNS infrastructure) is the biggest unmitigated current vulnerability in day-to-day Internet security operations, not to mention abuse. more